A Terrifying Poet

By Christopher Benfey

Published: April 25, 1999

ROBERT FROST

A Life.

By Jay Parini.

Illustrated. 514 pp. New York:

Henry Holt & Company. $35.

Robert Frost wrote so well for so long that it's easy to forget he belonged to the generation of American writers who came of age during the 1890's. His contemporaries, born in the shadow of the Civil War and doomed to hit the job market during a prolonged, fin-de-si cle depression, were tough-guy writers like Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and Stephen Crane. Frost got a slow start, but he outlived just about all of them.

By his 40's, midway through his life, Frost had invented a new profession for the poet in the United States, combining sporadic residence on college campuses with a continual roving around the country, a sort of permanent campaign. ''He was the first voyager,'' Allen Ginsberg remarked, ''a kind of pioneer, the original entrepreneur of poetry.'' In his late 80's, Frost joined the newly elected John F. Kennedy at his inauguration, reciting his patriotic poem ''The Gift Outright.'' In 1962, Frost held a personal summit -- as though he had been the one elected President -- with Nikita Khrushchev to try to iron out some wrinkles (like Berlin) of the cold war. It's hard to imagine a poet traveling farther or higher.

Robert Lee Frost, that quintessential New England writer, was born in 1874 in San Francisco. His ill-matched parents seem to have stepped from some nasty naturalist novel of the period. Frost's mother, pretty and ''ethereal,'' as Jay Parini describes her in his sturdy and well-informed new biography, ''Robert Frost: A Life,'' was besotted with Swedenborg and spiritualism -- her name, Belle Moodie, could hardly have been more apt. Will Frost, by contrast, was a hard-drinking, pistol-packing newspaperman who kept a jar of pickled bull's testicles on his desk (meaning, presumably, ''Don't mess with me''). As an independent-minded young man, Will had run away from home in Massachusetts to join the Confederate Army. (He got as far as Philadelphia before the police remanded him to his furious parents.) Later, he ran away to California, where he named his son after his hero, Robert E. Lee. When Will Frost died at 34, of tuberculosis and drink, Belle returned the family to the East and the strained mercy of her husband's parents.

Robert Frost was a brilliant student; as Parini notes, he became a better Latinist than those self-proclaimed ''classicists'' Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. But he found academic rituals stultifying and thought the classroom was about the last place to pick up anything useful. ''We go to college,'' he wrote, ''to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school.'' He dropped out of both Harvard and Dartmouth, and married his high-school sweetheart with few career prospects other than a fresh, unconventional talent for teaching children English and Latin. (The way to read a poet, he maintained, is ''to settle down like a revolving dog and make ourselves at home among the poems, completely at our ease as to how they should be taken.'') Subsistence farming and some teaching on the side became a pattern loosely adhered to for the rest of his life.

Frost believed -- it was almost an article of faith for him -- in the intimate connections between forms and farms. Ten years of raising chickens and children and he had metaphors on which he could draw for a lifetime. His first major literary success carried the populist-sounding working title ''Farm Servants and Other People'' before it was published as ''North of Boston'' in 1914, when Frost was 40. Frost was hardly the only World War I-era poet to be deeply distrustful of machinery. His anxiety about railroads and telephones (''They plant dead trees for living, and the dead / They string together with a living thread'') is almost Ruskinian, and no poem of his is more exuberantly harrowing than '' 'Out, Outa,' ''his account of a power saw accidentally severing a child's hand. His ethics and esthetics were artisanal; we ''crave the flaws of human handiwork,'' he wrote.

During the 1930's, Frost was predictably attacked for his stubborn pastoralism. Malcolm Cowley, scowling at ''Two Tramps in Mud Time,'' thought Frost should have given one of those tramps a job. But some of Frost's most impressive lyrics date from that dark decade, including such downbeat masterpieces as ''Desert Places'' and ''Provide, Provide,'' Frost's ''wry commentary,'' as Parini notes, ''on Roosevelt's New Deal'': ''Better to go down dignified / With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all. Provide, Provide!''

In the Frost biographical wars (initiated by Lawrance Thompson's authorized but rancorous three volumes of 1966-76), Jay Parini is staunchly pro-Frost, approving of his subject's many ways of ''providing'' for himself. Frost is the only character in this book; his doomed children -- one a suicide, one committed to an insane asylum, one (the happy one) dead in childbirth -- circle him like distant, errant planets, lurching into view for the next disaster. Frost's long-suffering wife, Elinor, whatever she was like in real life, seems drained of vivacity by her manic-depressive husband in this account, as she moves from pregnancy to pregnancy and illness to illness. Parini defends Frost as husband and father, arguing that his displays of selfishness and insensitivity were ''within the range of normal behavior'' and mentioning repeatedly that Frost suffered from ''depression.'' Frost's romance (after Elinor's death) with his friend and secretary, Kay Morrison, which is the centerpiece, almost the centerfold, of Jeffrey Meyers's recent biography, is given short shrift here: ''The relationship between Frost and Kay appears to have slipped into the platonic realm rather quickly.''

If Parini rushes through incidents embarrassing to Frost, he tends to linger too long on his favorite poems, piling up critics to sandbag his own spillover claims. He himself is often a much better critic and writer than the authorities he enlists. Does it really help our understanding of Frost's great late poem ''Directive'' to have its setting described -- by a critic Parini quotes approvingly -- as ''a deconstructed land that evades the pitfalls of both town and farm even as it repudiates the possibility of an uncorrupted wild space''? Parini is at his best when making claims for such neglected poems as ''Riders'' (''The surest thing there is is we are riders, / And though none too successful at it, guiders. / . . . What is this talked-of mystery of birth / But being mounted bareback on the earth?''), or when defending unfashionable poems like ''The Gift Outright.'' Against the view that the latter is a jingoist defense of Anglo-Saxon appropriation of North America -- The deed of gift was many deeds of war'' -- Parini notes that Frost's conquerors ''seem more like a virus than a nation.''

In 1958, when Frost turned 85, his publisher gave a party in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and invited Lionel Trilling to be the featured speaker. Trilling, who preferred cities to rural idylls, shocked everyone by confessing that he had only recently come to admire Frost's work, specifically for its overlooked grimness. ''I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet,'' he announced. Trilling sent a letter to Frost apologizing for the stir his remarks had caused. ''Not distressed at all,'' Frost wrote back. ''You made my birthday a surprise party.'' And then, in one of those swooping summations with which he regularly rewards his readers, Frost added: ''No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.'' Jay Parini's sympathetic book might have seemed sweet music to Frost, but the clash of arms will continue.

Drawing

Christopher Benfey teaches American literature at Mount Holyoke College. His most recent book is ''Degas in New Orleans.''